Electric Chairs

Look, furniture and technology just do not mix. Yes, I know, Captain Kirk had a really cool chair with lots of whizzy buttons on it. So did Jimmy Savile. But they were just TV props. Real people, in the real world, do not need high tech furniture - except, perhaps, in the case of Old Sparky, whose occupants are not expected to remain in the real world for very long.

So why a bunch of Japanese researchers have developed a table and chairs that glows different colours according to the colour of things put on the table is utterly beyond me. It seems that sensors in the table-top detect the colour of items on the table, an apple mac built into the table relays the data to the chairs, and they obligingly light up in colours to match.

Oh, and the strength of the colour varies according to the weight of the person sitting on the chairs. Great, isn't it? Once upon a time, your weight was a private matter between you and the bathroom scales, perhaps coyly divulged to close friends over a guilt-laden cream cake. Not any more! Your own chair will now demonstrate, in neon hues, exactly how hefty you are. Forget loose clothes and flattering lines. Give up on gripper knickers - the damn chair is broadcasting your weight as clearly as a neon sign.

According to the BBC, "The designers say that instead of furniture being inert and silent, it should be given a chance to interact with the people that use it."

No. Nonono. I do not want my furniture blabbing about my weight, or bringing on a migraine by changing colour every time I put something on the damn table. I chose the colour of my furniture because I liked it. I do not what it suddenly changing colour after I've bought it. I want inert, silent furniture that is comfortable to use and otherwise doesn't do anything at all.

And, while we're on the subject, I don't want any of those damned LCD photo frames, either. I spend my entire life surrounded by various display devices - LCDs, TFTs, CRTs - all glowing to their heart's content. When I get a little time away from them, the last thing I want to see is yet another screen cycling through a bunch of images.

Call me old fashioned, but I'm quite happy with a flat, non-interactive, non-luminous piece of paper in a frame. It's static, relaxing, doesn't consume any power and it works perfectly well. Leave it that way.

Billy Seggars.

Our Lord David Shayler

It's not every day someone thinks they're God, and even less frequently do these folks get any media coverage - most just end up in the nearest nut house.

But things are different if you're an ex-spy, alleged whistle blower and jailbird. Such is the pedigree of Mr David Shayler, who, in an interview with More4 News, last night announced that he was God.

Strangely, this revelation doesn't seem to have excited a great deal of interest in the Almighty's more conventional representatives - there are no reports of the Archbishop of Canterbury hurrying over for a quick natter. I do not propose to comment on Shayler's loaded question: "What I'd say to people is: Do I look mentally ill? Do I sound mentally ill? "

So, is he God? If he is, it would have been handy to keep him in the secret service, wouldn't it? Most parties to a conflict claim to have some form of supernatural backing, but very few can actually produce the Deity in question. The best Al Queada can do is a mangy pic of Osama Bin Laden in a cave somewhere - imagine the propaganda potential if we could trot out the Man himself, complete with MI5 ID!

And, of course, when he's not busy dealing with the knotty problems of world peace, famine, flood, Gordon Brown and getting Middlesborough into the UEFA cup final, there's always the lecture circuit to fit in.

Shayler's already pretty busy in that respect, and it remains to be seen if his new-found divinity will leave him with enough spare time to cope with demand, although I suspect it probably will.

As I've already documented on this blog, I'm not a religious kind of guy. But that was before. Now Our Lord David Shayler has revealed himself, I know exactly who to complain to, and believe me I'm going to make the most of it. A few Commandments on the subject of Smoking bans, Health Fascists and Environmental Zealots wouldn't go amiss, for starters!

Billy Seggars.

Facial Crossdressing

Time was when men were men, women were women and everyone knew where they stood - except, perhaps, in certain parts of the fetish community. Not, it seems, for much longer.

A survey has found that female humans prefer more feminine-looking guys when it comes to planning a long-term relationship. It seems that 'masculine' looking men were judged to be less faithful and worse parents, men with feminine facial features are seen as more committed and less likely to cheat on their partners.

I use the term "female humans" deliberately, because, as far as I can tell, the survey makes no mention of whether the participants were genuine, common-or-garden women, or the increasingly common, depressingly belligerent and universally unappealing "wimmin" variety.

Not that it matters, I suppose. You just know that love-lorn "new men", who have already been tempted into the cosmetics marketplace in recent years, will now be even more inclined towards feminising beauty treatment. A few of them - Tony Blair included, it seems - have already made a start by acquiring moobs (that's man boobs for those of you, who, like me, had never heard the term until the other day).

Still, to look on the bright side, it's news to delight drag queens and closet cross dressers / transvestites everywhere. No longer will they have to hide - when their wife catches them unexpectedly en femme, they can just say they were trying to strengthen their relationship. Whether that cuts any ice with wives and girlfriends outraged to find their fella decked out in their makeup and clothes remains to be seen.

Conversely, it's not such good news for those savvy ladies of negotiable virtue who have figured out that certain guys will pay lots of money to be "forcibly" dressed as a maid and made to clean the lady's house. The nature of fetish being what it is, I wonder, in light of this survey, how long it will be before those same guys are paying the same ladies to be dressed in a lumberjack shirt, heavy jeans and steel-toe'd work boots while they sit around, beer in hand, watching the women work?

And now, if you will excuse me, I must make good my escape - I see Mrs Seggars advancing with bra, panties and face pack in hand, and they look just my size...

Billy Seggars.

Foot and Mouth Disease

Foot and Mouth Disease, eh? Things just aren't going well for Gordon Brown, are they? Less than two months after forcibly extracting Limpet Blair from his perch in Number 10, he's had to deal with a bunch of inept-but-worrying terrorists, floods of almost Biblical proportions, and now Foot and Mouth Disease. Why did he want this job, again?

Still, no matter how badly things may be going for Gordon (and therefore for the public), I can't help feeling sorry for the farmers caught up in this latest fiasco, not least because this outbreak appears to be less an Act of God than and Act of Man. According to the Telegraph, the current Foot and Mouth outbreak almost certainly originated from the Pirbright labs close to where the infected cattle were discovered.

Astonishingly, bods from the Health and Safety Executive have torn themselves away from the pressing business of bath towel research, to produce an interim report on this incident. Broadly, the report concludes that airborne contamination from Pirbright was very unlikely, waterborne contamination was more likely but still a negligible possibility but that contamination due to human movement was a real possibility. Specifically, the report says:

"There are various potential routes for accidental or deliberate transfer of material from the site. We have investigated site management systems and records and spoken to a number of employees. As a result we are pursuing lines of inquiry."

"Release by human movement must also be considered a real possibility. Further investigation of the above issues is required and is being urgently pursued."

The keywords here seem to me to be "accidental or deliberate" - the idea that somebody may have deliberately released Foot and Mouth into the environment is chilling, but, in view of recent terrorist activity, not all that fanciful.

Indeed, the possibility does not seem to have been lost on the mainstream media either, as the Times reports here, and the Independent reports here. I'm not sure whether accidental or deliberate contamination is the preferable alternative, but, for Mr Brown, neither one presents an appealing prospect. He must be wondering why he ever moved out of Number 11.

Billy Seggars.

Madeleine McCann Mystery

To date, I've avoided commenting on this case, not least because I'm more than a little sick of reading about it; Madeleine isn't the only missing child in the world, y'know!

But this article, Madeleine parents' anger as police say she 'died in bedroom' in the Daily Mail is just too much to ignore. There are so many questions in this case that it's difficult to know where to start, but a good entry point is the incredible delay in asking British police officers to help in the investigation.

Now that the Portuguese police have made the request, British experts, sniffer dogs and all the usual wizardry of detection seems to be in place. And oh, look. The first thing they find in the apartment where Madeleine McCann was allegedly kidnapped is a cleaned-up blood stain on the wall.

Despite their being no publicly available information to that effect, the Portuguese police said, "Madeleine McCann was not kidnapped but died in her bedroom," according to the Daily Mail, and the Portuguese media seem to be taking the same line.

Of course, this is the same Portuguese police who seem to have messed around doing nothing very much for a very long time, and their conclusions must, as a result, be suspect. Similarly, the blood stain upon which this speculation appears to be based has yet to be identified. It could very easily belong to someone else who's stayed at that apartment, either before or after the McCanns, it could belong to a maid or other service staff or it could belong to the person who allegedly kidnapped Madeleine.

But what if it doesn't? What if the blood is that of Madeleine McCann? Under those circumstances, some very significant questions have to be asked. For instance, who cleaned up the bloodstain, and why? Would a kidnapper have the time, and the presence of mind, to start cleaning up behind him (or her), not knowing when the victim's parents might return? Would they even care - unless, perhaps, the blood is theirs rather than the victim's?

And would a kidnapper be able to enter the property, injure themselves or the victim, spirit the victim away and then clean up without waking the other two children asleep in the room? No, something is not right here.

According to the Daily Mail, "Madeleine's parents were forced to give a television interview today to counter growing claims in the Portuguese media that they were linked to their daughter's death in some way. " You can see why the media would be thinking along those lines, can't you?

For example, The Jornal De Noticias reported: "The discoveries made by the sniffer dogs, taken together, strongly support the theory that the girl (Madeleine) died in her parents' hotel room, either - as Portuguese detectives believe - the victim of an unexplained accident, or as the victim of a crime. The theory that she was kidnapped seems more and more remote."

Perhaps so; certainly, on the face of the material available in the media, it doesn't seem unlikely. But it must be remembered that the Portuguese police force has hardly distinguished itself in this affair, and such a conclusion may be no more credible than their previous comment, as reported by Mrs McCann: "Even last week the Portuguese police said, 'We are looking for a living child'."

Further, the McCann's are reasonably well educated and are probably at least as familiar as anyone with modern criminal investigation techniques. Wouldn't they do a better job of removing a blood stain, if they had, in fact, attempted to do so? Who knows.

Nonetheless, I'm astonished that it has taken so long for folks to even think about asking this kind of question. The media circus that has followed the McCanns around for weeks seems to have been almost entirely focused on the "human interest" angle of the parents' frantic search for their child. And, of course, that's a perfectly reasonable angle. But shouldn't the media also be asking searching questions?

Apparently not. When, in June 2007, German reporter Sabine Mueller asked Kate and Gerry McCann: "How do you feel that more and more people seem to imply you might have something to do with it?" there was outrage in the media, with the Mirror calling the question a slur.

No, it wasn't a slur. Whether the McCanns had anything to do with the events under scrutiny or not, it was a perfectly reasonable question, and seems all the more reasonable in light of recent developments. Naturally, I don't expect Joe Public to see things that way; to the vast majority of them, even thinking about asking such questions is a travesty of justice. Nonetheless, in the interests of everyone involved - not least the McCanns, and Madeleine, if she is still alive - they need to be asked.

A cloud of apparently not unreasonable suspicion - if the media reports are to be believed - seems to be forming around the McCanns, and, if it is unjustified, it needs to be dispelled with speed. The only way to do that is to ask the questions, examine the evidence and reach a logical, reasoned conclusion. Only then will the truth come out. The process, although belated, has started, and now needs to continue apace.

When the truth is known, the search for Madeleine McCann will be able to proceed without further trivial impedance, or be called off altogether. Time will tell.

Billy Seggars.